Don Cupitt is best known for developing a non-realistic interpretation of Christian doctrine and an ever-more radically antirealist position in philosophy.Cupitt has sought to go beyond ecclesiastical religion to a purely this-worldly humanistic religion of life: he argues for a "kingdom" version of Christianity that will bring it closer to the original Jewish Jesus. This book contains essays written over twenty years that appear in book form for the first time.

Prior to the late nineteenth century, classical Christianity developed no social ethics. Rather, it concerned itself with self-purification. Christians needed only to be `in a state of grace', unsullied and ready for the return of Christ. Muslims, in contrast, have always attempted to Islamicize the world. Today, many Christians and activist post-Christians are moving in that same direction. For them Christianity no longer entails a private practice of self-purification, but instead represents an ethical decision to struggle patiently and lovingly towards a new `reality' in this life. In Creative Faith, Don Cupitt argues that Christians need to replace a heaven-obsessed theology with a new theology of moral striving. No longer should they aim to conserve the self, preparing for eternity: they must simply expend it, by living generously.

If new Platos or Buddhas were to appear today, what would they say about the nature of reality, the human condition and the way to happiness?The period 800-200 b.c.e. the so-called Axial Age was the time when Old World pioneering philosophers and religious teachers laid down the basic ideas by which people have been living ever since. Today those great religious and cultural traditions are coming to an end. We are entering a new Axial Age.Don Cupitt observes that this second Axial Age is one of communication. Everything is accessible to everyone, and everyone can make a contribution. The world is therefore made and remade not by the individual genius, but by a change in the general consensus. Cupitt describes the emergent religion and philosophy of the new Axial Period in clear and accessible language. He predicts that, while it may seem very strange at first, we will learn to love it

Do you envy the suicide bombers their firm faith in life after death? Probably not: you think they are deluded. People in the west have quite recently lost all their old ideas about a Better World Hereafter. We now accept that we are already in the Last World, the world with no further reality beyond it, and that we'd better live our life to the full while we have it. If so, then what happens to the traditional problem of Christian origins? Jesus preached the arrival of the Last World, and urged us to begin a new 'solar' kind of living. His message was one of secular fulfilment. But the Apostolic Faith, by raising him to the supernatural world, took us all a whole dispensation back, to the Penultimate World, a world dominated by supernatural fears and hopes, a world of watching and waiting under strict discipline. The new era announced by Jesus was thus aborted, probably during the late 40s. But today we need, not the New Testament message, but a Last Testament for the Last World, which is our world. Don Cupitt attempts some midwifery. It is time for the faith to be born properly, and to become public property, not a clerical monopoly.

During the past 30 years, what we used to call 'the passing show of existence' has turned into a global torrent of electronic communication and cultural change. Everywhere, Tradition is collapsing. Local fundamentalist reactions - hailed by some as evidence that 'God is back' - cannot hope to stem the flood. They are merely symptoms of faith's increasing desperation. In our time, Don Cupitt says, religion is no longer about gaining immortality, or the forgiveness of our sins: it is about becoming reconciled to our life's transience, to time and death. This ultra-clear and secular 'theology' therefore centres around the image of the Fountain, which close-up, is all noisy, rushing transience, but when we step back becomes a healing, unifying symbol of life's perpetual self-renewal. This is religious thought with no supernatural world, and with none of the local divine names. But it works. About the Author The Revd Don Cupitt is a Life Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His books include Taking Leave of God, The Sea of Faith and Solar Ethics were published by SCM Press and translated into many languages.

According to Don Cupitt, radical theology is a personal struggle for a new and better kind of religion following the loss of the older sort of popular, traditional, ecclesiastical faith. It is, he says, inevitably, highly autobiographical. This set of eighteen unpublished or little known published essays which document Cupitt's gradual radicalization over the last thirty years open a window onto the progression of his thought and demonstrate his long held desire to come up with a message that can reach and influence ordinary people. Because, in Cupitt's judgment, the real ?radical theology? is your own voice, if you can but find it.

In this book Don Cupitt presents his systematic philosophy of religion. He begins by showing what is wrong with the way the subject is usually taught: scraps from various philosophies of the past are selected for use in the service of an agenda controlled by theology. Inevitably, the resqlt is,something closer to religious apologetics than to genuine philosophy. Cupitt sets out his alternative approach in two parts.The first is a 'democratic metaphysics'. Cupitt describes popular systematic philosophy as being today the most urgently needed, and yet the most neglected, kind of philosophy. He describes his own position as combining nihilism with radical humanism, and as 'a language-mediated radical religious humanism'. From this, Cupitt then derives 'philosophy's own religion': It is without dogma. It is a religion of life in which we learn to say Yes to,,transience, to practise expressive or 'solar' living, and to be humanitarians in social ethics. r Philosophy's own religion is the religious outlook we would come tQ if we were to make a new beginning, and to be strictly rational. It is not wholly novel: versions of it'crop up often in the history of philosophy. Another version of it was the very earliest form of Christianity, the 'kingdom theology' of Jesus and the first generation.

What is it about religion that, despite all odds, allows it to survive? In After God, the renowned scholar Don Cupitt considers the fate of religion, now that we have effectively killed off our gods. The author, a trained theologian and an ordained priest in the Church of England, takes us through the evolution of religious belief from the dawn of the gods to their twilight,as well as to the morning after.Tracing the postmodern pilgrimage from traditional belief to cynicism to faith after God, Cupitt says we need to build a new religious vocabulary. He challenges us to see religion less as an ideology and more as a tool kit, a set of techniques,perhaps an art form,enhancing our lives the way that literature and art do."A heretic's heretic" and "an atheist priest," Cupitt has respect for both skepticism and devotion. He neither accepts nor denies religion at face value he takes faith to pieces, throws away what he can't use, and assembles the remainder into new and extraordinary shapes, challenging us to creatively reshape it, give it new language, reinvent it. After God is for those who find it hard to be among the congregation of an orthodox religion but who miss the discipline and rewards of practicing a faith, and for the person who will understand Cupitt when he writes, "I actually think that I love God more now that I know God is voluntary. Perhaps God had to die to purify our love for him."

Don Cupitt's ethics may seem strange and furious; but he says that this is a religious ethic to fit the truth about the world and our own life as we now understand it.

Don Cupitt's concern is not so much the science of global warming as it is the absence of a serious ethical and religious response to it. When all existing "reality" breaks down, ethics can no longer be based on nature or religious law. Cupitt advocates for an alternative inspired by the historical Jesus.

This book was written in 1970, in the days when even the Church Times was welcoming Don Cupitt as a stalwart believer. However, as the author now points out, it is an important pointer to the future. The straitlaced early Cupitt is obviously struggling to prevent the later Cupitt from bursting out.' Its starting point was straightforward enough. Many, perhaps most of the great critics of Christianity have rejected it chiefly on moral grounds. Yet, because they have tended to suffer from an entrenched sense of their own moral superiority, Christians have never really taken this fact seriously enough and so have failed fully to understand one very important factor in the modern world's rejection of faith, The idea was therefore to outline the principal moral criticisms of Christianity, in order to discover how strong they are and what should be done about them. This was the beginning of a course which took Don Cupitt, as he himself confesses, much further than he ever expected. Many have parted company on the way at various stages; they, and those who find what Don Cupitt says speaks to them more than most modern theology, will find that these early stages, in retrospect, make fascinating reading.

'If you are one of those who persist in thinking that the old questions about the meaning of life, however badly framed they were, had something important behind them, then the answer offered here is that there is indeed such a thing as the religious life, that it has a variety of different possible shapes or courses, and that there is something important to be learnt from a consideration of the map of life as a whole. THere is not just one linear track running through three or four stations, as used to be thought in the past, but there are at any rate a large number of stations and a web of lines connecting them. I have set them out (in a necessarily simplified form) in a diagram on the cover and after the Contents page as a kind of Metro map of the spirit. The idea is that after the book has explained the map, you may be able to find on it the life-route you have yourself followed so far.'

Western thought began with an attack on religious myth by philosophers who held that the highest truth must be non-narrative and timeless. They left a paradox to haunt us: for on the one hand everyone knows that stories are important to us and our religion is full of them, while on the other hand stories continue to have a bad name as myths or fictions. It has been so difficult to say just how stories convey truth that until recently theologians were still trying to 'demythologize' religious belief. Now, however, philosophy has at last become more friendly to literature. There is talk of narrative theology and of rehabilitating story. Don Cupitt spells out the remarkable implications of the current return of philosophical and religious thought into time and narrative. He shows how stories produce reality, the self and time, how they awaken our desires and shape our lives, and how they express our paradoxical hopes of individual and corporate redemption.

In 40 years of writing Don Cupitt has coined many new words and phrases to communicate his ideas, but he has written so much that critics have split him up into stages, and readers complain of obscurity. Piqued, he here represents an entertaining 'Devil's Dictionary' of his own ideas, with cross-links from entry to entry guiding the reader around his system. Cupitt's teaching is a form of religious naturalism based, not like Spinoza's on geometrical reasoning, but upon the more biological idea of an uprush of energies pouring out into symbolic expression. He points out that the non-arrival of the Kingdom left the early Christians looking up vigilantly towards a better world that was yet to come. Today, people no longer expect any further world after this one, and Church-religion no longer works. It is too inhibited. Instead, we need to work out, and start living out, the philosophy and the ethic of the final world, now. It is a world in which the original spirituality of the 'inner life' is replaced by a new religion of 'self-outing' and putting on a 'good show' - the religion of 'solar' generosity that Cupitt attributes to the original Jesus.

Many ideas once thought to be foundational to Christianity are now known to be false due to scientific discoveries regarding the nature of the universe and historical findings about how Christianity began. Is Christianity doomed to irrelevance or even extinction? How might Christianity reinvent itself so that it can address the real concerns of people in today's world? This collection of essays from such leading thinkers as Karen Armstrong and John Shelby Spong addresses questions such as life after death, the meaning of God, apocalypticism, and the significance of Jesus' death. Contributors: Karen Armstrong, Don Cupitt, Arthur J. Dewey, Robert W. Funk, Lloyd Geering, Roy W. Hoover, Robert J. Miller, Stephen J. Patterson, Bernard Brandon Scott, John Shelby Spong

Christianity s classic plan of salvation was a vast myth of cosmic Creation, Fall and Redemption. Earth-centered and supernaturalist, it was fatally damaged by Galileo and later astronomers, and by historians of human origins. In A New Great Story, Don Cupitt rewrites the old grand-narrative as the story of how religion called us out of nature and gradually made us ourselves: social beings in an ordered world, language-using and self-aware. Religious ideas, whether they build civilization or inspire criticism of it, are always leading ideas. They made us everything that we are. Cupitt sees the history of religion as culminating in the teaching of Jesus, who announced a new age in which human beings are at last fully themselves, fully reconciled to each other and to life. That message was long almost immediately, and the cycle begun afresh ...

For two centuries and more our culture has been secular, and no religious doctrine now plays a constitutive part in any established branch of knowledge. Yet if God is dead, he won't lie down, and reminders of the old faith still pervade our language, the built environment, our art and our literature. Most important, themes of the old theology are currently returning to us in new and strange guises. Thus God, the strict Judge who searches our hearts and demands inner integrity, returns in the critical thinking which makes everyone trained in it 'his own hardest taskmaster'. Again, the biblical idea that the world is made by the utterance of language returns in modern poetry and linguistic philosophy. By assembling such reminders, Don Cupitt shows that a surprising amount of traditional Christian belief - including a new Grand Narrative, and a non-metaphysical theology - is currently returning to us in secular form. Don Cupitt is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Today, Western culture rules the world, but understandings of what it is are oddly contradictory. The Vatican claims that the West owes everything to the Catholic Church, its oldest institution, but the European Union currently defines its core-values in purely-secular Enlightenment terms. Third-World critics attack the West for being irreligious and morally decadent, while at the same time they successfully demand Christian behaviour from it, in the form of repentance for the past and generous aid in perpetuity. To sort all this out, Don Cupitt proposes a reinterpretation of Christian history, arguing that the meaning of the West is not Catholic Christian but radical Christian. The original Jesus was a secular figure, a utopian teacher of ethical wisdom. After his martyrdom his followers personified his teaching in him and promoted him to Heaven, while postponing the earthly realization of his new world until his return at the end of history. Thus transformed into a religion of deferred salvation, 'Christianity' flourished for some fifteen centuries, but it always knew that its final fulfilment would be on this earth., and from the Enlightenment the decline of the Church was also the beginning of Christianity's extraordinarily successful afterlife as modern Western culture. The Pentecostal dream lives on in our multi-ethnic liberal democracies, Jesus' ethic lives on in our modern humanitarianism and in the welfare state; and the Christian spirituality of stringent selfexamination lives on in our critical thinking and our spirit of perpetual striving for betterment. Indeed, Cupitt argues that the core of Western culture is simply the old Christian spirituality extraverted. Today, Christian supernatural doctrine is dead, but the secular 'West' is Christianity itself now emerging in its final, 'Kingdom' form. Don Cupitt is a Life Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

For a generation after his death his surviving associates preserved good traditions about the message of Jesus. Then disaster struck: it began to be believed that he was risen, exalted to heaven, and soon to return to establish his kingdom on earth. A cult of Jesus' person and fictitious lives of him quickly followed, and the surviving traditions of his actual teaching became totally blurred - as they still are.Since then, nobody has ventured to assess Jesus seriously, as a thinker. But today, as the supernatural beliefs fade, and better reconstructions of his teaching have become available, Don Cupitt thinks we can at least question Jesus from the standpoint of philosophy. Just how original and important is he? What is the status of his ideas: was he a religious figure at all, and why did he arouse such fierce antagonism? The Jesus who emerges from this enquiry is an astonishing figure, and much bigger than the insipid Christ of popular faith. Don Cupitt is a philosopher of religion and the author of over 40 books. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Don Cupitt believes that a new and truly global religious consciousness has been quietly easing itself in around the world. It does not need any visible organization and does not make any non-rational doctrinal claims. It is the religion of life - a secular, purely this-worldly, and radically-democratic affirmation of ordinary life. Where prescientific ages saw Heaven, he says, we see only sky. We have given up belief in a supernatural world, and we have felt compelled to break with the received ecclesiastical form of Christianity. But the Christian spirit of critical thinking, of systematic self-criticism and perpetual reform, has spread around the whole world in modern science, technology, critical history, and liberal democracy. In ""Above Us Only Sky"", in 27 brief slogans, he presents a systematic theology of this religion of ordinary life, setting it against its philosophical background, its spirituality and its relation to other faiths. It is, he says, the legacy and the long-awaited fulfilment of Christianity.

The Old Creed and the New is Don Cupitt's latest writing in his on-going project to modernize religious thought. His previous works have argued that since the Enlightenment almost every new movement in Christianity has been neo-Conservative and authoritarian. Here he looks to the liberal theologians of a hundred years ago who attempted to modernize religion but were often content merely to simplify and liberalize the creed. Today's radical theology, he argues, contrasts by beginning to produce something so different from traditional religion that the public may at first feel baffled by it. Don Cupitt here sharply juxtaposes the traditional Apostles' creed of western Christianity and the emergent creed of modern radical theology. Side by side, they look amazingly different, and Cupitt carefully explains what is happening, and why. The main change, he argues, is that the old creed situated the believer within a huge narrative cosmology, the central myth of a great religion-based civilization, whereas the new creed merely defines the bare outlines of a modern spirituality. The new religion emerges as being scarcely creedal at all: it is the practice of 'solar living'. People no longer 'look up': instead, they are content simply to claim their own lives, to find their own way of living them, and to live life to its fullest. Just ordinary life itself is now the religious object - which shows the 'post-protestant' character of the new outlook. The Old Creed and the New tries to define and situate this new kind of religion, and encourages the reader to think about it both intellectually and spiritually.

In this text the author studies our use of the terms it and it all, to show how ordinary language sees the human condition. The answer turns out to be a form of radical religious humanism.'

When Don Cupitt was struck by a very brief y et violent religious experience he wrote a note about it on the spot. Now in retrospective analysis of that moment he de velops a postmodern vision of the world and the human condit ion. '

Don Cupitt descrubes time-pessimism as the spiritual disorder of the age, and its cure as the prime task of postmodern religious thought. We must redeem and revalue time, transcience and this mortal life of ours. He believes that it can be done. It really can be done.